I commented today a post from Peter Gray, about Sudbury Valley School (SVS), where kids are empowered to decide how their school is run, and especially where they learn mostly by themselves. Thanks to Jean-Hugues for the link to Peter's blog.
This school is very close to a model school I envision. I believe the values there should be expanded beyond the school and into society at large. For one thing I believe that voting should be a right for all ages including voting for a president. The current system is just age-discriminatory. Nobody should be excluded from voting. Even past and present felons, mentally retarded people should be allowed to vote.
I would like to know how SVS is handling justice proceedings. I personally believe the current justice system is wrong in assuming that people are able to make rational judgments based on real facts. Everyday we discover how our judgment is impaired by our emotions and other prejudices and this results in many unjust sentences.
Furthermore I do not believe in the value of sentencing which assumes that people are bad and need to be punished. There are no such thing as bad people or good people. People make mistakes though, and mistakes may have bad consequences and should be discouraged. Likewise people make goodtakes (there is no antonym for mistake in the English language), and goodtakes may bring good consequences and should be encouraged.
What society needs to learn, as much as our children, is to maximize good consequences while minimizing bad consequences and doing so without judging people as fundamentally good or bad. Although one could argue that people making mostly mistakes are bad people, I would say that these people need more help than others and that society may need extra protection against these people's actions. The idea that people are bad is only a heritage of the bible and its original sin. We all know by now that we are just a specie among millions making its way through evolution. Judging is plain bad, has bad consequences, and should be discouraged.
Society needs to be protected from the acts of really dangerous people. This should never be considered a punishment or judgment or sentence, only a way for society to be able to function while looking for better ways to handle such dangerous people. This would oblige society to seek more human ways of handling difficult situations.
As far as learning is concerned I believe the best learning material is already out there on the Internet and books. Kids, and adults, need to learn much more than pure academic knowledge which is useless unless one is able to understand the real world in which we actually live. Current schools do not represent the real world, they are teaching kids into an imaginary world which does not exist and will never exist.
The Internet is a better representation of reality because we find everything there, the good, the bad, and the ugly. In real life we need to learn how to sort (quickly if possible), the better from the not so good. Everyday we see people caught by various hoaxes like the recent Bigfoot story which made a fool of mainstream media. People get caught by hoaxes because they have been educated into an imaginary world. Likewise a lot of people fall for conspiracy theories because they can't understand the real world.
How will people make sustainable decisions if they are not able to understand the real world?
How will our kids better integrate in an ever-changing world?
Since my kids where able to move (literally) a mouse, they have a computer connected to the internet with no content filter. They have no restriction as to what they can get and I am not worried about it. They are now 14 and 16 and are perfectly capable of not abusing this freedom. From time to time we have a discussion over what they do on the Internet but I never judge their actions. I only give them personal insight as to where they might be going if they keep going to some places too often.
As far as math is concerned, most people hate it, fail at it and eventually never use it in their real lives. When I was 8 or so, I was fascinated by stars and science. As soon as I could make multiple places multiplications I figured out the distance light travels through out a year (a light-year). I did this during recess while other kids where more interested in doing something else. Nothing would have prevented me from answering this question. If I had the internet at the time I would have done more math and science than I did with the rigid school system and books I had no choice over. Later, I remember my science teacher answering my questions with "this is not in this year's curriculum", I hated that of course. Scientists become scientists because they love science, not because they have been forced into learning science in school.
I graduated with a degree in electronics, only to quickly become a computer programmer because I wanted to create a startup and that doing so was too expensive with electronics. My parents did not have money, I did not know how to raise money and venture capital did not exist where I was. I did not even know what venture capital was. Everything that I use professionally today, I learned by myself, mostly through books, the Internet, and of course the help of friends and colleagues.
Although my kids follow a traditional curriculum, because my wife and I did not have a real choice, we encouraged them to learn by themselves as much as possible. My son learned singing, playing guitar and game programming all over the Internet and with very little of my help. My daughter learned drawing awesomely and much more the same way. Both my kids are experts at communicating with their peers over the internet and cell phones. They have developed the skills they will need in tomorrow's world, their world.
In the school I envision, kids have unlimited access to as many books as possible, computers, the Internet, online courses on the widest variety of subjects, and whatever will be valuable next to better learn about the real world and which will likely come out of the Internet. Kids have access to a garden, physical enrichment facilities, and a kitchen. They learn when they want, what they want, with the help of peers and adult staff as needed.
The values we want to promote are: self-discovery, adaptability, creative thinking, self-learning, respect the differences of their peers and learning from them, social interactions, a sense of humor, and a try-to-understand instead of judge attitude. The world is not black and white, we want our kids to understand that and be subtle. We want them to learn that some forms of lying may be sometimes better than crude truth, and that breaking a rule may be appropriate in some limited cases. We want them to question everything that cannot be explained and justified even, and especially, if it has been done the same way for a long time without anyone complaining.
We make assessments using a variety of tools, especially online courses, and we reward both academic and social achievements. We encourage students to set goals and measure how well they manage to reach their goals. This prepares them to better know themselves and set reasonable expectations about their abilities while developing planning skills.
As much as possible we use wikis for online courses and school organization and encourage kids to improve courses, or create new courses. We encourage them to become active contributors to collaborative web sites such as wikipedia and other open source initiatives.
When kids are sick, or just do not feel like coming to school, they can stay at home, or go to a friend's home. We do not require parents or doctor notes when students return to school. We do keep track of school attendance both as a tool for individual assessments and school-wide statistics. We assume that if students do not want to come to school we may be doing something wrong. Because students are not fearful of judgment they are free to tell the reasons why they preferred to stay at home that day and this may result in some adjustments from themselves or the school. While at home, students can actually pursue their personally set goals. Some may even set a routine of not coming to school certain days of the week. When parents want to go on vacation during a low-traffic period to benefit from lower transportation fares and less crowded vacations, we believe this is a valuable reason for their kids not to come to school. From an academic standpoint, because kids subscribe to online courses, they can achieve any result asynchronously from on-campus activities. We also accept unschooled and home-schooling children to join our school.
Every month we setup a parent-student-staff conference where we exchange ideas and make decisions. Everyone is entitled to a single voting right. Once a year we elect the school president and management.
We may exclude kids from the school only in extreme cases where we do not know how to deal with repeated dangerous behavior. Before coming to such an extreme decisions, we will evaluate all possibilities including modifying our operations as long at it is financially reasonable. Expulsions require a special vote of more than 80% in favor of the expulsion. Likewise the termination of a staff member may only be accepted with an 80% in favor vote. This is because we believe that a simple majority voting system is not appropriate for all decisions in a modern democracy. Likewise, school rules may setup lower than 50% quorum for passing some resolutions recognizing the right of minorities to exist within the school.
Parent are always welcome on campus as long as they are properly identified and follow on-campus rules set during our meetings. They may come to be with their child, meet staff or just help out.
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